Knorr’s pictures were taken when Margaret Thatcher was in power.
Photograph: Karen Knorr

The trappings of inherited wealth and privilege, alongside the invisible, but strictly defined codes of the British class system, have long provided fertile raw material for photographers. The aristocratic Cecil Beaton and the unquestioning Slim Aarons both, in their differing ways, made great wealth seem synonymous with good taste, while Martin Parr has often accentuated the vulgarity of the new super-rich in close up and in vivid colour.

With Gentlemen, which is as knowing and playfully political as its title suggests, Karen Knorr offers a different kind of questioning gaze, more artfully constructed and quietly thought-provoking. The series is a conceptual companion piece to Belgravia, published last year, in which Knorr evoked “the everyday of a privileged minority” in one of London’s most exclusive districts through images made between 1979 and 1981.

For Gentlemen, she gained access to the various gentlemen’s clubs in central London between 1981 and 1983, to delve even deeper into the rituals of the English establishment elite. Her quiet portraits and interiors are accompanied by texts that reflect – and parody – the language of power, privilege and patriarchy.

Thus, a portrait of a besuited man standing as if lost in reverie on the marble bust-lined balcony of his club is accompanied by the words: “Whatever a man’s social origin, once he has been elected, he is looked upon as an equal by his fellow members.” This statement could apply, with equal banality, to Eton or the House of Lords. It is, as Knorr suggests, the self-serving language of the public school and the Conservative elite.

It is this conceptually driven play of image and words that makes Gentlemen such a mischievous meditation on the sanctity – and absurdity – of these male institutions and the people that inhabit them. The portraits and the texts are not what they initially seem, the former being art-directed by Knorr to be both “natural” and revealing, the latter being constructed from parliamentary speeches of the time, as well as quotations from contemporary news reports. The end result is a kind of visual and linguistic mimicry that echoes, sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely, the language, values and beliefs of the English aristocracy. Among them is the belief in primogeniture – the right by law of the firstborn son rather than daughter to inherit the parent’s estate. Being born male, then, is, as Knorr suggests, the first privilege from which all others flow.

Intriguingly, the images in Gentlemen were made when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Despite her being granted honorary membership of the Conservative gentlemen’s club, the Carlton, such institutions remain very much a male milieu. Throughout, Knorr captures the sense of entitlement that these institutions insist on and perpetuate as well as the vague aura of absurdity that attends their continued existence. Though much progress has been made in terms of gender equality since she first made this work more than 30 years ago, the gentlemen’s clubs endure in their intransigence, as does their behind-the-scenes influence on politics and business.

“Whilst women now have full property rights,” writes Knorr on her website, “they still remain under-represented in key positions of governance and in financial and academic worlds. It is still a boys’ club in which some women are honorary members.”